Category Archives: media

Even George started small

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under education, language, media

A great improvement over an inexplicably beloved brand franchise:

A Few wizards staying up late during a brief moment in time

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under digital, media, network, trend

(irr)

Home naming is killing the, oh, nevermind…

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under crime, language, law, media, trend

IPR ideology trickles down:

A former South Dakota lawmaker convicted of [a bunch of awful stuff] has sent news organizations what he claims is a copyright notice that seeks to prevent the use of his name without his consent. A letter and an accompanying document labeled "Common Law Copyright Notice" said former state Rep. Ted Alvin Klaudt is reserving a common-law copyright of a trade name or trademark for his name. It said no one can use his name without his consent, and anyone who does would owe him $500,000.

Plan B: the national-security argument.

An iPhone app you can wrap your fish in

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under media

The NYTeims tries out newspaper as website iPhone app as newspaper:

NYT "article skimmer" screengrab

The founder is no doubt spinning sliding in his grave.

More, please

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under media, science, sex

(JLo)

“In an insane world, the sane man must appear to be insane”

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under education, language, media

Also sprach Hauptmann Kirk.

LAT:

With the birth of his son 15 years ago, dedicated linguist d’Armond Speers embarked on the ultimate experiment: He spoke to him only in Klingon — the language of the alien race of “Star Trek” fame — for the first three years of his life.

“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers said. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”

So when Ultralingua, a dictionary, translation and grammar software company in Dinkytown, honored requests from customers to create applications for a Klingon dictionary, they turned to Speers, a self-employed software consultant.

“It was right square in my sweet spot,” said Speers, who graduated from Georgetown University in 2002 with a doctorate in computational linguistics.

If he'd used Europanto, his son would still speak it fluently.

QOTD

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under language, media, religion, trend

Dan Pinchbeck, upset at Mark Dery:

I do not think that there will be a “multidimensional realm of hyperspace triggered by mass activation of the pineal gland.” That quote was taken out of context, I can only presume intentionally.

Onnaccounta this.

Queen, bishops, pawns

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under economics, government, media

The Guardian (formerly known as Teh Grauniad but since displaced by the NY Teims) does a number on HM:

091117 Guardian (UK) "What We Pay Them" graphic

QOTD2

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under digital, international, language, media, network, standards, trend

Paul Vixie:

To underline our understanding of what DNS is, we must differentiate it from what it is not. The Internet economy rewards unlimited creativity in the monetization of human action, and fairly often this takes the form of some kind of intermediation. For DNS, monetized intermediation means lying. The innovators who bring us such monetized intermediation do not call what they sell "lies," but in this case it walks like a duck and quacks like one, too.

Monetized intermediation means lying.

QOTD

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under digital, government, international, language, law, media, network

Grimmelmann:

Your avatar’s arms are never going to be long enough to box with a game god whose software controls arm length.

Or, as we used to put it: he who would snack with the Devil must needs use a long spork...

( jotwell | froomkin )

The Return of Martin Lukes?

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under crime, digital, finance, media, trend

One can only hope.

Flickr Pro, Flickr Con

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under crime, digital, government, law, media, military, neighborhood, security, trend, urban

Bernie Kerik’s Flickr photostream includes gems like Officer Kerik in ’93...

Officer Kerik

...“plainclothes” (modulo the assault rifle) Kerik escorting Susan Rosenberg (ca. ’83?; SR playing ping pong here)...

Kerik guarding “Rosenberg”

...authentic arrest scenes...

Ossifer Kerik arrests outside of PA

...and, indeed, pretty much his entire rise and fall. Except for his mugshot:

Kerik mugshot

The kommissar disappears:

BK to MDC

(Left: Flickr, plemeljr, 8 Feb ’05 [detail]; right: m3t00, 11 Oct ’09.)

Futile style

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under art, digital, media, network, trend

(It’s tempting to ask why this lasts as long as it does, but to many that question would suggest that this is way too long; it may be so, but a better question is whyit lasts precisely as long as it does? Not a deep question — but this is a fine example of a new sort of genre that most geezers Do Not Get.)

(dvc)

“Counterintuitiveness”

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under economics, environment, language, media, trend

Krugman:

At first glance, though, what it looks like is that Levitt and Dubner have fallen into the trap of counterintuitiveness. For a long time, there’s been an accepted way for commentators on politics and to some extent economics to distinguish themselves: by shocking the bourgeoisie, in ways that of course aren’t really dangerous. [...] Clever snark like this can get you a long way in career terms — but the trick is knowing when to stop. It’s one thing to do this on relatively inconsequential media or cultural issues. But if you’re going to get into issues that are both important and the subject of serious study, like the fate of the planet, you’d better be very careful not to stray over the line between being counterintuitive and being just plain, unforgivably wrong. It looks as if Superfreakonomics has gone way over that line.

Economics connected to politics? Imagine that!

There goes everybody

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under digital, media, military, trend

BBC reports:

The Polish authorities in charge of Auschwitz have launched an official site for the former Nazi death camp on the social networking website Facebook.

Facebook's limited vocabulary

RT @auschwitz: "   "

(ts)

Flock of unmentionables

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under media, misc, privacy

(an)

Invisible hand spotted

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under digital, language, media, network, standards, trend

Phil Patton:

It showed the hand of whoever fed pages into the scanner — a hand with a latex sheath on its index finger, like a condom. The person’s nails were nothing to brag about. The condom and the nails, combined with the sudden, unexpected appearance, made the picture seem obscene and unhealthy. I thought with horror of the guy who found a finger in his bowl of fast-food chili.

Google scanning technology

Patton asks: “So it is likely that the company will also ignore this question: If the process of creating Google Books is open and its motives good, why is there so much secrecy about the nuts and bolts?”
(rp)

Web 2.0 1.0

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under design, digital, media, network, privacy, trend

An edifying history:

Yahoo: Geocities is over. No, really.

The number of Geocities pages that archive.org actually archived in any given year tells a bare-bones story:

1996: 7
1997: 13
1998: 39
1999: 70
2000: 136
2001: 22366
2002: 0

A JPEG of the archive.org Geocities page puts it in perspective — the original image at 12 inches wide is over 12 feet long:

Archive.org's Geocities snapshot dates @ 10%

Detail:

archive.rg Geocities datestamp detail

A walk down memory-constraints lane: banner ads, duly archived.

Geocities Techqire banner ad

Geocities ear candy ad

Geocities market deals ad

Geocities tree live ad

Major social networking sites will probably prove to be more durable than Geocities (which Yahoo bought for US$3.65 billion), but that’s a pretty low bar.

Eat the Red Catfood

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under art, design, digital, idea, media

Prehistory of The Matrix:

hard to describe

Attn net.artists looking for a project: super-8 bullet-time.

( ffffound | jk )

Tweet tweet: a little birdie told me…

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under crime, digital, government, law, media, network, security, trend, urban

The Guardian reports on an NYC anarcho arrested for twittering whereabouts of police at Pittsburgh G20:

Elliot Madison, 41, from Queens, had his home raided and was put on $30,000 (£19,000) bail after he and Michael Wallschlaeger, 46, were tracked to the Carefree Inn motel in Pittsburgh during the summit on 24 and 25 September. The pair were found sitting in front of a bank of laptops and emergency frequency radio scanners. They were wearing headphones and microphones and had many maps and contact numbers in the room. Official police documents allege the two men used Twitter messages to contact protesters at the summit "and to inform the protesters and groups of the movements and actions of law enforcement".

OTOH...

During the summit, the police openly monitored Twitter to listen in to the protesters' communications.

"Openly."
(rp)

Move over Grauniad, here comes the Teims

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under language, media

Calling Sebastianaro Timpanaro! NYT misspells “euphemisms” in Safire obit:

euphamism

(The context suggests it was a joke rather than a typo? They corrected it.)

Innocent mistake or Freudian mise-en-abyme in which NYT copy editors exact posthumous revenge on the in-house father of language?

Escalating the cable wars

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under media

Furious posturing aside...

...more, please.

Big fig

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under media

Futuro-sovietica

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under design, international, media, trend

Context for Tarkovsky:

(ss)

NYC, World Capital of FAIL

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under LDCs, architecture, design, economics, environment, finance, government, media, neighborhood, security, trend, urban

Cryptome catalogs it.